Collocations Dictionary: www.Just-the-Word.com

Today’s post will briefly review a website I recently came across which caught my eye right away. This website is www.just-the-word.com. Just-the-Word is a collocations dictionary, like www.ozdic.com, but it is slightly different. What makes it special is that you can type in a word and it will tell you not only the different possible combinations, but it will also give you an idea of the frequency with which those combinations occur. Let’s see an example with the word «awareness«:

In this example, which only shows «verb + awareness» collocations, we can see at first sight that «raise», «increase» and «develop» collocate extremely well with «awareness«, given the long green bar next to them. If this bar were red, it would mean that it is a bad combination. Also, although this picture shows only collocations of verbs with «awareness«, there are plenty more which I haven’t included: adjective+awareness, noun+awareness, awareness+preposition, etc. In order to visualise these, you can either scroll up/down, or choose them in the menu on the right, which looks like this:

By clicking on one of the combinations in the picture above, you will be taken directly to that particular section.

Another interesting option is that you can create a word cloud with these collocations. This is created through another useful website, www.wordle.com.

The nice thing about this is that it gives you a visual representation of the collocations, as the size of the phrases is in accordance with their frequency. This might be useful for a lesson, a blog or a social networking update. Besides, you can choose from a variety of options to visualise this word cloud.

So that’s it. Just-the-Word has other interesting features, but the ones in this post are the ones I believe are most useful for both English language teachers and learners. For more info, follow this link and let the creators convince you themselves.

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